JSR: You mean our currency is based only on the capacity for consciousness to feel pleasure and pain? Can it be? It seems so strange.

Ezekiel: This is a secret from the world, and the world does not realize it, but goes on with its illusions—and most of what is in the world are only hallucinations such as you would see were it not for your pills, only yours are more obviously hallucinations. For the economists all agree that capital merely represents something, but they say it represents "purchasing power". But what ought we to purchase? If what we purchase gives us no pleasure, like those useless pyramids and cubes of glass we discussed, it is useless to consciousness. If there is a problem anywhere in the world, a concrete problem like potholes in the road, money is used to fix it. But why fix potholes? Simply because people don’t like them! There is no other reason. If potholes caused no one annoyance and anguish, there would be no reason to fix them. So is it with all the things we spend money on—environmental cleanup, health care, food production—if we spent no money on these, there would be injury, pain, and death—consciousness would suffer. Say I have a lot of purchasing power. What shall I purchase? Shall I purchase something that I don’t want, the lack of which would not give me any pain, the possession of which would not give me any pleasure? Of course not! I would be a fool if I did.

Happiness is the highest pleasure. When one merely pleases the senses, there is only so much pleasure to be had; one may have sexual intercourse, but if one does this too much at once there will be no pleasure in it—one will get tired of it. The senses can only give so much pleasure—they have a limit as to how much they can please the soul. But when one is happy, one can be happy all the time, and this is the highest pleasure. But yet they say, "Money cannot buy happiness," and this is true. Though the ones who say this also say money is worth something, it is simply not worth happiness. But if happiness is the highest pleasure one can feel, and money cannot buy that, what is it worth? As I said, the only reason money is worth anything is that it allows us to do things and buy things that give us pleasure. If money cannot buy happiness, and happiness is the highest pleasure, no one ought to seek money—we ought to seek happiness instead. The man who seeks only money in this life is like one who goes into a china shop, and says, "How much is your finest china?" And the clerk replies, "That cannot be bought with money. It must be earned otherwise." And so the man settles for all the inferior china, and wants nothing else; all his life he thinks that if he collects enough of the inferior china, he will be satisfied that he has the best, not because of its quality, but simply because of its quantity. And many poor men have the finest china in the shop, and he lacks it! For distribution of wealth in society is only distribution of the power to give consciousness pleasure—but the System cannot distribute at all the power to get the highest pleasure—happiness. And so it gives us illusions. There are as many poor people who are happy as there are rich people; but the System gives the poor illusions, and says, "You would be so much happier if you were rich," and this is a lie; but the poor believe it, and so they serve the System more in the hopes of getting rich. They are made unhappy by the consciousness that they are poor—though this is no reason to be unhappy; the System puts these illusions in them. In the poorest third world country, there are those that sing; these are rich with Prana; and indeed this very valuable Prana this nation is poor in. For no matter how much money we have, the System is constantly whispering in the ear, "You would be happier if you had more," and we believe it, and thus are made unhappy. But you and I don’t believe it, and we are happy. Neither did the prophet Diogenes, who slept in a barrel and went about naked—he was rich in the highest Prana, that of happiness. And look at you. You hardly ever shower or brush your teeth, your apartment is filthy—you are like a Diogenes except that you sleep in an apartment. And the world tells you, "Live like we do, or you won’t be happy." They look at you and smell your disgusting smell and see your filthy teeth and think you must be miserable; they look at the homeless and assume the same thing. But you merely say to yourself, "I don’t want to be friends with somebody anyway who is only friends with me because of the way I smell, whether good or bad." You are like a man who hates his dog, when his dog is kidnapped for ransom. The kidnapper calls him, and demands money thinking he holds the man’s happiness and controls it, and the man merely says, "You may keep the dog or bring him back; it’s all the same to me."

But do not suppose, simply because each must earn his, her own happiness, that the Prana of happiness cannot be given one to another. If everyone you knew despised you, and treated you with all kinds of abuse, it would be very difficult for you to be happy, wouldn’t it? And the rapist steals the very happiness of the woman he violates—though she may earn it back with hard effort. The child in a harsh family cannot be a happy child; so too the man in a harsh society finds happiness only at great lengths. And indeed, this very Prana is disappearing from the land.

This land is set up to generate all kinds of merely manufactured happiness, false happiness, satisfaction for only false appetites. Let me explain my meaning.

What is a TV set? It is a box that gives off sound and light. There is no pleasure in staring for hours at complex patterns of light. But the System has manufactured the pleasure we get in TV, by convincing us that they give us pleasure with commercials—and so we believe it, and believe not only will it give us pleasure but happiness. Really it is a strange sensation watching the TV: the eyes become dull, the mind becomes a passive recipient, the images turn ridiculous so we laugh, the images become fast so we are excited. If only you knew how the angels see this! To them we are like retarded men finding joy in some shiny thing like a penny, or a blinking light. Were we really retarded they would say, "How cute," but we are healthy and sound, and so they look to us and say, "How sad, look what they have been reduced to."

But you say, "It helps our economy that people buy TV sets," and indeed this is the justification for the sale of all these useless machines we all have. And this is the very heart of legal impossibility: the impossibility is that capitalism creates wealth. This impossibility has become our law. Everybody believes this, even our leaders who urge us to spend, and yet it is impossible. For there is toil, and the product of toil, nothing more. There is nothing else that enters into the equation, and everything a society feels it must have, it must toil to make. We cannot become wealthy merely by making more things, and passing them back and forth between us in complex patterns. Had we not all these useless machines, it would only mean less toil and less poverty. If we only toiled at the things that truly gave us happiness—as they do in the gardens in the stars—there would be many more who are genuinely happy, and there would be much less toil without all these other things. I know this doesn’t seem correct to you: you are still fooled by legal impossibility.

Really, TVs are a tax. There is one in every home, for they have convinced so many that they give pleasure—and those who watch them believe it, and constantly indulge in false pleasure. How much does a TV cost? 200 dollars? So here is what they do: they collect 200 dollars from every home in exchange for a useless trinket—and the society as a whole can absorb this cost—and then they give all the money collected to those who have nothing—the ones who would be out of a job if they did not make TVs. For they say, "If we do not collect 200 dollars from everyone, and give this to those who would be out of a job, these others will starve—and each household will hardly miss the 200 dollars, it is such a small amount." And in turn the one who makes TVs will spend 200 dollars on some useless thing someone else makes, and so it is like charity, each giving his entire, her entire surplus to the others in exchange for useless things. Certainly we all have the basic things because of this—but so would we if we simply gave our entire surplus to every other, instead of forcing them to toil at making useless machines. So instead of merely taxing us 200 dollars and using it to hire the jobless to make things of value, they convince us to buy useless things, and use the money to hire men and women to make these useless things. And thus the useless things in the land multiply, and the toil in the land must multiply and multiply, and all are overburdened with toil—for everything in your home someone toiled to make. And indeed, most in this land spend every extra dollar on these new machines they are constantly making. They are fooled into this by legal impossibility—they willingly buy useless things, but would not stand for it were it a tax to go to making things of value, even if these were given to all for free. But in the gardens in the stars each has his job, her job, at toiling to make useful things, things that bring happiness. And if there is no work to be done, and some are jobless, they will say, "We shall take up a collection—200 dollars from each household—only we will not pay you to build us some worthless machine—we will pay you to play basketball with your friends." Really, they do not have the same system of money as us—so this is not literal—but this is what they would do had they our system.

Most of what we are wealthy in is all sorts of new sensations—the sensation of watching TV, looking at a computer, talking on a cell phone, playing a video game. And there are men who get together and say, "What sorts of pleasing sensations can we invent next?" and thus they play with the senses, creating different types of sensations we have never had before. But none of this brings happiness—men and women were just as happy without these a hundred years ago, perhaps even happier. In the gardens in the stars they do create new things and inventions—but only things that bring happiness. They do not analyze the senses and say, "What sorts of pleasing sensations may we give the people?" but they say, "What sorts of inventions will make the world a happy paradise, in which all are content, in which no one lives in misery?" For material things and sensations are needed for happiness—such as food, health care, a clean environment, transportation, clean water and many other things—but they do not do as they do in this world, creating every type of empty titillation that brings no happiness. And thus they toil in the gardens in the stars only at what brings happiness—and there is no need for advertisers to create false appetites—and so there is much more genuine happiness, all are rich in Prana, and there is bliss beyond comparison.